Sunday, November 13, 2005

Do you smell smoke?

Flashback time!It was about 1985 and my parents went out for the evening and left my sister in charge for the very first time. It had taken much begging and the fact that no decent babysitter within a 20 mile radius would would stay on the phone the moment they said our names (a point which filled us with great pride). We were infamous!Our house was old, built in the later end of the 1800's. There weren't many cabinets in the kitchen and very few places to keep the amount of snacks we savages went through in a week. Out of desperation, our parents kept a lot of our stash in the oven. My parents left for the evening and we promptly ignored my sister's pleas to be good and began plotting what to destroy first. We had settled on boiling some old 8 tracks when my sister suggested dinner first.It started off ok. Frozen pizza..... how bad could it be?We sat around the table waiting for our pizza and debating on whether boiling the 8 tracks would work or if we'd have to stick them in the oven when the pizza was done. "Do you smell smoke?"I thought we were just burning the pizza but when we opened the oven a few small flames jumped out. My sister had missed a cellophane wrapped bag of chocolate covered pretzels in the back of the oven.I screamed, my brothers both ran for the fire extinguisher and my sister ran to her room.My brothers fought over who got to put out the fire and I ran next door to tell our neighbors that our house was on fire.My younger brother won the argument when he agreed to let my older brother get first pick on in his Christmas presents. The little bit of fire that was there could have been put out with just a squirt but being the little hellions that we were, one squirt was not going to cut it. Fire extinguishers smell awful! Emptying a fire extinguisher on a tiny fire? Really awful!I wonder what my parents first thought when they pulled up and saw the fire department outside their house. I wonder what they thought when I came up and said 'It wasn't me' or when my younger brother came up and said 'There isn't any real damage!'I wonder what they were thinking when they left us alone again!